Thursday, September 27, 2012

Goal Play: Leadership Lessons from the Soccer Field

We had a great virtual conversation with Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, talking about leadership lessons that he has learned from many years' experience coaching a girls' soccer team.  We all reflected on our experiences with teams and coaches, highlighting constructive feedback and interventions from coaches which are supportive of our growth, as well as unhelpful feedback.  It was a first for the BFR (Boston Facilitators Roundtable), in having a fully interactive virtual session - fun!
Key learning: it is possible to have a fun, interactive event in the virtual space :)
Check out Paul's blog about the event:
http://goalplayleadership.com/2012/09/22/goal-play-webinar-with-boston-facilitators-roundtable/

Can't wait to set up our next author event!


Monday, July 23, 2012

"Learning from Mistakes"

OD consultants like myself are very interested in organizational learning, building the capacity of teams and staff to learn from their experience in order to improve future performance.  We help organizations create the practices of ongoing reflection and learning, gleaning lessons from what worked and what didn’t work.  Learning from mistakes in high stakes situations is of paramount importance and interest, for example, in health care.

You’ve have probably heard stories about wrong-side surgeries, where patients wake up and wonder why the bandage is on the wrong side ;)  I was very interested in how Beth Israel Deaconess handled this 5 years ago, when then-CEO Paul Levy wrote about it in his blog, Running a Hospital.  Now I’m enjoying his new book, Goal Play, in which he connects leadership to lessons from the soccer field!  Levy talks about creating organizational cultures that “learn from mistakes”, which I think was a highlight of his tenure at Beth Israel.  There was a highly-publicized surgery mistake in his hospital, and the administration was very open about what happened.  They did not fire or punish the surgeon.  When challenged about that, Levy maintained that if you want people to disclose errors in the future, you can’t respond in a punitive manner.  Hence a learning organization – they were creating the conditions for people to be able to disclose and learn from their errors.  There were also other measures and tools that they implemented to improve the way people worked together.

One popular tool is a checklist, which was highlighted in Atul Gawande’s book, Checklist Manifesto.  I’ve been a fan of his since before he became famous. :)  He urges OR doctors to go over checklist of questions before every surgery in order to reduce errors.  Health care borrowed this from the aviation industry, which also uses checklists. The characteristics that both industries share is a hierarchy with a chief at the top – the pilot or the doctor, wherein the rest of the team defers to the chief, who may lead them down the wrong path – to a wrong-side surgery or to fly into a mountain.  The airline industry created CRM, crew resource management, to help crews have conversations that will help them prevent errors.   CRM includes 3 steps:  state the facts; verbally challenge the captain; take an action that impedes the ability of the captain to make a fatal error.  

The problem with CRM is that staff who are used to deferring to the chief, who is seen to have the ultimate power, are reluctant to raise questions or to provide negative information that would question a leader’s decision.  What teams need is time to practice the skills of speaking up, to break their habit of keeping silent, and to get over their fear, well in advance of stepping into an Operating room or a cockpit.  There is an  important role here for us to play:  to coach leaders on the need to be open to receiving this feedback and to not punish people for giving feedback – as well as coaching the team and the leader on how to give feedback to one another, in a respectful way that isn’t blaming or humiliating.  The ideal would be for us to help leaders create working cultures where people invite feedback.  As facilitators we are used to asking for feedback when we facilitate groups, and hopefully it’s a skill we practice with our clients.  When we ask for feedback we are modeling that which we’re asking leaders to do – which makes our ability to ask for feedback a real gift to our clients!
Do you have a story of helping a team to give one another feedback?  How did it go?

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Coaching and Compassion

As a coach I try to be compassionate, to stand with my client in the confusion or lack of clarity of the situation that they find themselves in.  To witness with them.  Not to judge.  To understand what it feels like to be in that position.  I know that that compassion has to start with myself, which is a lifelong journey.

I was thinking of that when I heard about 3 principles for "Living an unfettered life": Don't judge; don't compare; let go of the need to know why.*    I know that I often judge people, and frequently compare my situation to others, which doesn't really get me anywhere, so I try to remember this saying and to aspire to this ideal.  I have ample opportunity to practice this in my personal and my professional life :-)  I don't always get what I want (who does?) and I don't always understand why - which leads to my attempt to "let go".  My endeavor to live up to these 3 principles brings me to the need to have compassion, for myself, for my clients and for the human condition.  Hopefully that makes me a better coach!

*= unknown source

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

How do you make group norms more effective?

Rick Lent raised a great question about the challenges we face in facilitating meetings. I think it's not enough to set ground rules/norms. I like to ask a group: How will you/we hold each other to these norms? What I'm aiming for is shared leadership and shared facilitation, to build their capacity to monitor themselves - and I love it when someone else makes a process comment, like "I don't think we're clear about how this decision is going to be made", or whatever.  
There are surely other factors that influence whether or not we/ participants, wish to follow the norms - such as, "Am I on board with the purpose of this meeting?" "Do I trust the leader or the group?" "Do I believe that people will carry out the decisions that are made?" As facilitators, we need to address these questions as well, to make this transparent to the group. These are usually unstated thoughts, and part of our gift is to surface the unstated and the undiscussables!

We are the answer!

“Remember, all the answers you need are inside of you; you only have to become quiet enough to hear them.” Debbie Ford. Thanks to Elaine Starling for posting this.
You know how interesting it is when something you say as the professor has a great impact on your students - something said casually or as an aside?   In my course on Organizational Change a student asked me a question about "how do you know", like, how do you know you're choosing the right thing?   The context wasn't critical for this purpose.
I remember saying, "I used to think that the answer resided in other people, so I used to ask them "What would you do?" until I figured out that they didn't have "the answer" that would be right for me; I had to find the answer inside myself." - and that statement hit the spot for some of the students.
What I forgot to tell them is that it's a lesson that I need to keep re-learning!

How Can I Help You?

Has this ever happened to you? A peer asks you for advice or suggestions, and when you respond, s/he gets upset that you didn’t deliver what they were asking for. Darn! Is it me or is it them? My new learning is that it’s on me.
I have a colleague who, every time I ask for assistance to think through a problem, stops me before I get very far to ask: What is it that you’d like from me? What are you asking me for? Aha! That’s what I need to remember to ask.  And, for example: Are you asking me to brainstorm solutions, or not? Are you asking for my opinion?   
OK, anyone want to help me test this?!